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Guest Post: Like No Other Lover, Julie Ann Long

Here is the first post in what I hope will be an ongoing series of posts about the importance of diversity in the romance genre. Kicking things off is @colorlessblue! I’ll be travelling today, so won’t be able to release comments out of moderation as usual.

Like No Other Lover, Julie Ann Long

I discovered the Pennyroyal Green series through highly positive reviews, and started by the first book, The Perils of Pleasure. It felt like reading an old-times roadtrip book, the kind of story where every unexpected thing happens to thwart the arrival at the destination, where comedy mixes with drama and each chapter ends with a new cliffhanger, like a Victorian serial. I thought it similar to an even older book, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Colin might be an aristocrat, and not criminal, but he’s still a lovable rogue who gives the story a Picaresque feeling. With Madeleine as badass heroine, it became one of my favorite books as soon as I started reading.

Like No Other Lover’s hero is Miles Redmond, an entomologist and Explorer who has traveled to the South Seas in search of unknown butterflies. As a Brazilian biologist, I was prepared to fall in love. Instead I found myself repeating an experience I’ve already had too much of in my life: the fetishization of tropical spaces and dark-skinned women. Miles has had sex with a lot of dark-skinned women in his travels.

Race in historical novels is always complicated. Almost by definition Regency novels tend to be completely White, with the occasional appearance of a character who’s half Indian or half Native American (biracial characters being often used for inclusion while trying to keep things not so scary.) And the historical period being right in the middle of England’s imperialist/colonial efforts always makes for awkward reading. I’ve read a number of romances with military heroes who’ve served in India or characters of color who feel out of place in the racist ton, with varying degrees of success or facepalming. Sometimes I cringe and shake my head, sometimes I laugh at the author’s lack of awareness, and sometimes I suspend my awareness of the racial and political issues so I can enjoy the book. In Like No Other Lover, I hurt, because I was expecting better from an author I’ve come to love and trust.

“Noisy rainbow-feathered birds and irisdiscent butterflies the size of Chinese fans spangled the air; dusky-skinned women as entangling as the flora shared his bed at night. Everything was abandoned and excessive.”

“And suddenly, as Lord Albermarle stood at his elbow and pressed him for stories of warm-blooded women of easy virtue, it happened.”

When I was 19, I tried to use the internet to learn and practice English, and I made an ICQ profile that mentioned the city I lived in. I received a message from an USian tourist 20 years older matter-of-factly telling me which hotel he was in and how much he’d pay for the night, which was more than the usual, he said, because I spoke English and he expected conversation besides sex. The dusky-skinned woman of easy virtue is me. “Everything was abandoned and excessive” is Hollywood geography.

“affectionate women who wore nothing for clothing above their waists all day.”

The National Stereotype of Brazilian Women was born with the country. The Caminha letter to the King of Portugal goes on and on about Native women, their nudity, their bodies, the shape of their genitalia. (It’s creepy, really. I feel dirty in a bad way when I read it.) Nowadays, people whose only knowledge of Brazil is Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival parade on TV are still asking me online if I walk around in a sequined bikini shaking my butt all Day long. The parades happen during a 4-day period, in a closed street, for tourists who bought expensive tickets to watch, but people generalize from there without thinking how ridiculous it would be to generalize the whole of USA by what happens in Las Vegas shows.

“Plenty of debauchery to be had in the South Seas,” she said sagely. “Native girls and whatnot. He’s probably just grown bored with that debauchery nonsense.”

“She thought of native women and debauchery.”

Like it was published on Slate, “Whisper the country’s name and, after soccer, sex is the next association.” Because White foreigners see Brazil (and most of Latin America) as “miscegenation gone wild.” Sexual tourists who come to Brazil (more specifically Rio de Janeiro) “believe that Brazilian women are endowed with a sort of hyper-sexuality, which is the result of a combination of miscegenation (or racial mixing), the tropical climate and a non-puritan mentality.”

There’s also a belief in anachronistic space (“movement over the space of empire is also a movement back in time”), a belief that “women in Rio are like what women were before” in the U.S. (before feminism – besides all the solicitation and offers of employment in porn that I get online, I also get marriage proposals, with the explanation that Brazilian women know how to treat a man and are great cooks.)

What makes it so frustrating, and so hard for me to finish reading Like No Other Lover, is knowing that Julie Anne Long is capable of doing better. It’s true that this portrayal of racist, imperialist English aristocrats in the Regency period is realistic, but it also makes extremely unsympathetic characters for a post-colonial reader. I put the book aside and went on to read I Kissed an Earl, where she seems to be setting the stage to tackle slavery. And like Miles in the previous book, Flint has slept with women of color. He has a Moroccan mistress named Fatima, whom he plans to marry before meeting Violet Redmond.

“You love Fatima, don’t you, after a fashion?”

It took him a moment to recover from their collision with honesty. He studied her, head tilted slightly, for a moment of silence.

“She’d think your name exotic, too, you know.” Sounding amused.

“Why did you just say that?” She was irritated.

“It’s the way you say her name. You make it sound as though your lips can scarcely form it for the sheer exoticism of it. And I know of a certainty it’s not a struggle for you. It’s very common name in her land, you know. Like Anne in yours.”

She fidgeted. It was an uncomfortable observation.

There. Realistic, and so much better I cried in public when I read that.

This is a really good post. Thank you for writing and sharing it. I’ve been struggling with some historical romances lately–and I’ve been reading this series out of order, like you, but have been stymied by this one because I couldn’t get past how those Othering references. It’s frustrating, being suckerpunched by the small ways that an author, a book, can seemingly carelessly dehumanize me, and people like me, as they build their story, and it MATTERS, as you beautifully explain, because these historical legacies still have consequences for people today.

This is such a great post. I’m about two thirds into Courtney Milan’s recent release, The Heiress Effect, and am finding her portrayal of an Indian character really wonderful. He’s not biracial (it’s so true, as you point out, that mixed race is used to soften the effect), and he’s at the receiving end of some pretty awful racism. He has a heartbreaking conversation with his heroine about not even being in a position to dream of freedom for India. (He’s not a mouthpiece for some simplistic idea of colonisation either, as that made it sound. He’s conflicted in a really interesting way.)

Thank you so much for this. If its a new to me author, one who I have yet to build up trust in, I can easily move on, seeing it as a learning experience and avoiding that writer in future. If, on the other hand, the writer is one, as in your case, whose other work I have enjoyed and I have learned to trust her enough to suspend my disbelief and allow her to lead me through her narrative, it is very hurtful to learn that she sees me, or anyone, as people who can be dismissed, disregarded, or, in whatever way, othered.

In either case though I believe words have power and this should never be dismissed or accepted without question. But it is also terribly sad because it shows such a lack of imagination, such a very limited worldview on the writer’s part.

And @Anna Cowan: I too read and enjoyed The Heiress Effect, but perhaps that storyline was a little too neatly and nicely wrapped up. I don’t know that it could have been done better within the confines of the genre (and word length), and it was a secondary romance, but that’s a minor quibble. The portrayal of the character was, as you say, nuanced and real, and that, unfortunately, is rare enough in mainstream romance to be significant, and loudly applauded.

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